““Every time you switch your focus from one thing to another, there’s something called a switch-cost,” says Dr. Earl Miller, a professor of neuroscience at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “Your brain stumbles a bit, and it requires time to get back to where it was before it was distracted.” ““You’re not able to think as deeply on something when you’re being distracted every few minutes,” Miller adds. “And thinking deeply is where real insights come from.”

Peelen and Kastner extend studies of attention in the lab (using simple, neutral displays) to the real world (complex, meaningful scenes). They discuss interactions between what and where templates shaped by object familiarity, scene context, and memory

Everybody knows that we can only hold a limited number of things in mind simultaneously. Is this capacity limit due to a limited number of “slots” in working memory or due a limited resource pool that is divided among the items held in mind? We found evidence for both (Buschman et al, 2011). Now, Roggeman et al use computational modeling to provide further evidence for a hybrid model for capacity limits of working memory.

Cowell and Cottrell trained a computational model on images used in fMRI studies of object and face processing. They used multivariate pattern analysis and were able to replicate evidence for a specialized face area even though the model had no specialized processing for faces. The authors suggest that fMRI evidence for a specialized face area should be interpreted with caution.

Excellent review of an important topic: Working memory capacity. The limitation in working memory capacity is the most objective, easily measured, and tractable property of conscious thought..Luck and Vogel (2013)

Peter Lakatos and Charlie Schroeder have conducted elegant work showing that the brain entrains its rhythms to attended sensory inputs. Here, Lakatos et al show that normal human subjects show increased rhythmic entrainment with increasing task demands, By contrast, schizophrenic patients are less able to match their brain rhythms to attended stimuli, even when the task is highly demanding.

Miller Lab alumnus, Andreas Nieder, finds that abstract decisions divorced from motor plans are distributed across frontal areas, even those traditionally thought of as motor areas. In fact, they are more strongly encoded in the presupplementary motor area than the prefrontal cortex.Merten and Nieder 2013

Miller, E.K. and Cohen, J.D. (2001) An integrative theory of prefrontal cortex function. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 24:167-202. Designated a Current Classic by Thomson Scientific as among the most cited papers in Neuroscience and Behavior. View PDF »

Pannunzi et al propose a model of visual category learning in which bottom-up sensory inputs to the inferior temporal cortex are sculpted by top-down inputs from the prefrontal cortex (PFC). The PFC improves signal to noise by enhancing the category-relevant features of the stimuli.

Want to know what it does? Here’s a start:
Miller, E.K. and Cohen, J.D. (2001) An integrative theory of prefrontal cortex function. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 24:167-202. Designated a Current Classic by Thomson Scientific as among the most cited papers in Neuroscience and Behavior. View PDF »